My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It's like there's a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.

What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, 'What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it.

I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.

Sin is too great an evil for man to meddle with. His attempts to remove it do but increase it, and his endeavours to approach God in spite of it aggravate his guilt.

The cast of 'Vikings' is a real team, a true ensemble. It's a mad, eclectic, great bunch! But we support each other and trust each other completely. There are no egos.

The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

LIFE: My favorite occupation.

You might be a redneck if you consider a six-pack and a bug-zapper high-quality entertainment.

I was a terrible English student.

A child without an acquaintance of some kind with a classic of literature ... suffers from that impoverishment for the rest of his life. No later intimacy is like that of the first.

The bishop is a lot like me...just when you think you have me, I'm already behind you.

I want to burn the world because Alan is gone," he said. "I want to destroy everything I see. But you mean something to me. I will not destroy the world, because it has you in it.

The biggest hindrance to the missionary task is self. Self that refuses to die. Self that refuses to sacrifice. Self that refuses to give. Self that refuses to go.